6 Ways Google Ads Can Help Your Online Marketing in a Competitive Market

No matter what business or industry you’re in, you’re bound to have competitors. And over the years, the competition has only increased with the evolution of technology and the popularity of the internet.

This is because you’re not only competing against the competitors within your area, you’re competing against all the businesses online that are everywhere.

Maybe you’re asking: how do you succeed amidst this tough competition? First you need to determine your real competition that would truly put a dent in your own business as this would help you to better market what you do.

1. Google Ads extensions

In the past, you could only convince your potential website visitors through your ad headline and description. Therefore, if you can write attractive titles and descriptions, then you’ll have a higher click-through rate (CTR) for your ad.

But what if you could still improve your ad CTR? That’s the added value that ad extensions bring.

Whether you’re using your ads to create brand awareness or using it to sell a product, there are many types of ad extensions you can use to boost the effectiveness of your message.

Here’s an example of an extension that appears below the ad that pops up in search results:

The first main advantage of using ad extensions is that it helps your ad occupy more real estate on the search results page.

The next is that you can add more detail to your message and include a call to action, like including a phone number or way to immediately contact you.

What are different types of ads extension available to use on Google Ads for your PPC Advertising campaign? Some of them include:

Call extension

Location extension

Message extension

Promotion extension

Price extension

App extension

Structured snippet extension

Sitelink extension

i). Promotion Extension

A popular type of extension is the promotion extension. At different times of the year, you may want to engage in promotions to attract more customers.

This could coincide with a season or you could just be running a special discount or deal to move your products.

Having a promotion extension is an incentive for search engine users to click through into your website.

WordStream found that ads with the promotion extension got close to a 10% click-through rate which was far higher than a normal ad generating around s 4% click-through rate.

To add this extension, go to your Google Ads overview and click on the “Ads and Extensions” tab. After that, click on “Extensions”.

Click on “+ Create ad extension” on the next page.

After this, you’ll see a list of different types of extensions you can use. Click on “+ Promotion Extension.”

On the next page, click on “Create new.” Here you can add details to set up your promotion extension. One of the settings allows you to select the occasion for your promotion.

After this, you can enter other promotion details like the type of discount, item on sale, and specific destination URL leading to more details about how people can get the deal.

After doing this, you can pick the start and end date for your promotion. This would probably be the duration of the season or a limited time offer on a product you’d like to sell fast.

There’s an option to add other details in the “Advanced options” too, like extending the ad scheduling or targeting mobile devices.

After setting up the necessary details for your promotion extension, click “Save.”

Here’s an example of a promotion extension on an ad below:

ii). Message Extension

The Message extension is a type of extension that allows potential customers to act without having to visit your website. With this extension, prospects can send you a message or book an appointment.

This makes it easier for searchers to take action. According to Google, 65% of consumers would consider using messages to schedule an in-person appointment or get more information about a service over doing it through their website.

To add this extension, select the “+ Message extension” option.

On the next page, you can enter important details like extension text, phone number, message text, etc.

When you’re finished filling in the details, you’ll see how your ad will appear to a prospect:

Then click on “Save”.

Here’s an example of an ad with a message extension below:

When using a message extension in their ad, Career Path Training Corp. got qualified leads from 30% of the texts they received.

2. Geo-targeting

When you go through your customer records, one detail you’ll find is that most of your customers probably live in a certain location.

Most people want convenience when doing business so an ad about a business in another state is unlikely to convert most searchers. People closer to your business are likely to buy from you or call your phone number to get more information.

“Google Ads location targeting allows your ads to appear in the geographic locations that you choose: countries, areas within a country, a radius around a location, or location groups, which can include places of interest, your business locations, or tiered demographics.

Location targeting helps you focus your advertising on the areas where you’ll find the right customers, and restrict it in areas where you won’t. This specific type of targeting could help increase your return on investment (ROI) as a result.

When it comes to advertising on Google Ads, consider the real estate adage: “Location, location, location!” Regardless of how great your ad is, it probably won’t perform as well if it doesn’t appear in the right places. Reach your customers where they are and where your business can serve them by using Google Ads location targeting. You can set and then adjust your location targeting settings at any time.”

That’s why targeting a specific location, in your ppc management campaign, could help you market your business more effectively. So how do you go about geo-targeting your ads?

To target your ads to a location, navigate to your campaign settings and click on “Edit” under locations:

After that, you can type the location you want to target and see the potential number of internet users you can reach.

If you’ve selected a region as your target location, you’ll see it highlighted in the map:

If you operate a small local business, you might not have to target a region as most of your customers will already be in that area. If this applies to your business, use the radius targeting option. Click on the “Radius Targeting” tab to set it up.

Enter the location of the center of your radius, which should be where your business is. After doing this, enter the radius you think covers where your potential customers reside. It could be in miles or kilometers depending on your preference.

If you’re targeting a whole country, you may decide to exclude some locations for various reasons. Click on the “Bulk Locations” tab to add these locations. Select your country code and enter the locations you want excluded.

By using geo-targeting, location-based keywords, and bid optimization, Georgia Eye Associates increased their CTR from 0.95% to 2.80%.

3. Remarketing

How many of your website visitors carry out your desired action during their first visit? Fewer than you expect. In fact, Ad Roll found that 98% of visitors to your website won’t purchase a product during their first visit.

However, this doesn’t mean that your 98% of web visitors haven’t considered buying from you. It’s just that some of your visitors are in the early stages of the sales funnel, which means you can increase your sales if you bring some of the visitors that left your website back (called remarketing). Google has a remarketing feature that allows you to target people who have visited your website and to bring them back to your website.

To implement this, go to your ads account and click on “Shared library”:

Click on “Audiences” when you get to the next page:

If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll have to install the remarketing tag on your website. This is how Google will track the visitors to it.

If you don’t know how to install the tag, click on “Tag details” to see steps on how to install the tag on your website.

After installing the tag on your website, go back to your ads account and click on “+ Remarketing List.”

There are 4 options available to target people depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, whether you’re trying to appeal to website visitors, mobile app users, customer emails, and/or YouTube users.

The most popular remarketing option is to target website visitors. If you click on “Website visitors”, you’ll have to fill in details like remarketing list name, who to add to your list, membership duration, and other details.

In most cases, you don’t want to target people who just visit your website. For instance, if you want to get people to buy your products, it’s better to target someone who has visited the specific page for it or done a little bit more research on that product.

These people are likely to go back to your website as they’ve already expressed interest in your product. Here are the different options Google gives you to retarget your website visitors:

You can also target people who visit pages with a specific keyword. In some cases, this could be a service you render and can target people with related ads.

4. Schedule ads

Like most things, timing is vital for the release of your product. If you’re marketing your products or services to potential customers too early or too late, then the probability of making a sale is low.

There are certain times of the day or year when people are likely to buy your products. For instance, if you sell coffee, you might want to target people during their work breaks or early in the morning when people are on their way to work and most likely to stop and grab a cup of coffee.

Likewise, if you sell a software service that people use at work, you shouldn’t be running ads at midnight when people are out of work and not likely to see it.

This also applies to seasonal goods. With your ad schedule, you can set your ads to run at a specific time and you can also increase your bid during this period to ensure your ad is at the top of the search engine rankings.

So how do you schedule your Google Ads? To schedule an ad to run at a particular time, navigate to the campaign where your ad is and click on “Ad Schedule.”

Click on “+ Ad Schedule” when you get to the next page.

On this page, you’ll have to set the time and day your ad should display. You can also select the 12 or 24-hour clock format. Click “Save” after you fill in the details.

If your ads perform better at a time of the day, you can increase your bid during this time to ensure your ad is more likely to be at the top of the list for that time.

With ad scheduling, you can display your ads at times when potential customers will see it and give your ad more of a chance to be successful.

5. Carry out A/B tests

What is the exact way to attract prospects to your business all of the time? This is a question no marketer can answer because different businesses have different customers and they can’t read their minds. Also, what worked yesterday may stop working tomorrow.

Therefore, testing is an integral part of any marketer’s job. It’s one of the best ways to gauge and improve on what’s working. A/B tests are even more effective because your results are not based on guesswork.

You can experiment with different parts of your ads to see what work and what needs to be eliminated. And with A/B testing, you can improve your marketing based on what your prospects prefer rather than your own opinion of what you like.

To create an ad A/B test, go “Drafts & experiments”:

After this, click on the “Ad Variations” tab and then click on “+ new ad variation.”

Then select the campaign where you want to run your ad variations. Rather than run your tests across multiple campaigns, the best practice is to run your tests on one campaign to be able to measure your results effectively.

After selecting your campaign, you can then filter your ads using different headlines, descriptions, and path. Then the second filter allows you to modify your ads based on whether they contain, equal, start with, or end with a word or character:

After doing this, you have to create your ad variations. Create 1-3 types of ad variation, which are:

Find and replace

Update text

Swap headlines

As the name suggests, “find and replace” allows you to test two different words in your ad copy.

The update text option allows you to make more changes than just “find and replace”:

Swapping headlines allows you to test two headlines to gauge which is the most effective one:

To apply your ad variation, set the details of it like adjusting the name, start date, end date, and experiment split. After setting this, click on “Create variation”:

After setting up your test, it’s important to leave your ads to run for a decent period of time. This will allow your ads to have enough impressions to ensure the accuracy of your test.

Apart from A/B testing to improve your Google Ads, you can also use these insights in other parts of your marketing.

6. It provides keyword ideas for SEO

Google Ads provide extensive data about your keywords like which keywords are bringing traffic to your website and which keywords lead to the highest conversions.

With these pieces of information, seo company can improve your ads by focusing more on the performing keywords to increase your revenue. But you can also use the details you get from keywords on Google Ads to improve your SEO service strategy. The search term report is one of the most important to check out when analyzing your data as it shows you the keywords that have high impressions.

You can also see keywords with high click-through rates and conversions, giving insight on what prospects are searching for, as well as the best keywords to target if you’re pursuing conversions.

Include this keyword in your content to pursue a long-term goal of ranking for that keyword. It’s possible after a period of time that your page will rank high for the organic result and also high for the ad placement.

This helps you to dominate the search results page and attract more clicks.

To utilize this report, go to the keyword section of your ads account. Click on the “Search Terms” tab. You’ll see more details about each of the keywords.

Another way you can use Google Ads to improve your SEO services is to identify ads with high click-through rates (CTR).

Study these ads, analyzing the headline and the description, keeping in mind that an ad with a high CTR has done many things right. You can also use this ad headline for your title tag and the ad description for your meta description.

This can also apply to other tactics in digital marketing agency strategy like using this structure to create attractive headlines and meta descriptions for a blog post you’re trying to rank for.

Conclusion

If you think of Google Ads as just an avenue to display your ads and bring visitors to your website, then you’re underestimating the breadth of this effective marketing tool. Google Ads can do so much more to elevate your marketing to the next level.

The most important step you can take is to implement these strategies in your ads and soon you’ll see improvements in your marketing key performance index.

Alex Membrillo

Founder and CEO

Alex Membrillo is the CEO of Cardinal, a digital marketing agency focused on growing multi location companies. His work as CEO of Cardinal has recently earned him the honor of being selected as a member of the 2018 Top 40 Under 40 list by Georgia State University as well as 2015 and 2016 Top 20 Entrepreneur of metro Atlanta by TiE Atlanta, Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 2016 Small Business Person of the Year,and the Digital Marketer of the Year by Technology Association of Georgia (TAG).

Cardinal is a Digital Marketing Agency focused on Igniting Growth in Multi-Location businesses. Our belief in democratizing digital marketing has enabled our clients to generate big returns at a local level. Cardinal has been honored to make the INC 5000 list for the last three years.